Jason Dessen, the protagonist of Blake Crouch’s novel Dark Matter has the perfect life. Well, no life is perfect, but he loves his wife, Daniela, once a promising artist, now a teacher, and his teenaged son, Charlie. His job as a physics professor at Lakemount College affords him a nice life but everyone knows that he could have had so much more if he had chosen a different path.

When the novel opens, Jason is off to raise a glass to his former college buddy Ryan, who has just won the prestigious Pavia Prize. On the way home, he is mugged and abducted and things only get stranger from there.

I am not going to pretend to understand anything about the science that happens in this book, but I honestly don’t think that it matters all too much if you do. Ultimately this is a book that examines the different trajectories that your life might take if you had made different decisions. It posits that every time you come to a fork in the road, and you make a selection, another version of you and the other choice carries on. That’s an extremely simplified version, of course.

The action of the story unfolds as Jason tries desperately to return to his old life while encountering versions of himself that actually want to continue living their chosen lives. Essentially, it’s the multiverse and although some of it was certainly beyond my understanding, the human side of it was completely relatable.

“Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse?”

Ah, yes, the road not taken.